Jim Sterling in court.
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The latest denied motion...Gades said:
On the 12th of September, James Romine filed his case, including a request for a subpeona to Valve for contact details of various Steam users.
On the 27th of September, the court told James Romine he hadn't followed one of the local court rules and needed to come into court on the 17th of October to explain why. (The thing he had missed was that he needed to give written permission for a magistrate judge to review the subpeona within 14 days of filing - he hadn't).
Later the same day, on the 27th, James Romine asked for the case to be dismissed and for future correspondence to be handled via email. The court agreed and the case was dismissed on the 30th. Included with the dismissal was a note that he no longer needed to attend the court on the 17th to explain himself.
The following Monday (the 3rd of October), James Romine filed the paperwork he'd missed regarding his approval of the magistrate judge. He didn't need to, since the case had already been dismissed. Included in there was another motion for permission to "File Magistrate Fome with Exception". I've no clue what that is.
Yesterday's denied motion was just denying the "fome" motion on the basis that the case had already been closed.
It could be that James Romine hadn't noticed the case had been dismissed (unlikely) or he was just covering all the bases and making sure he wasn't going to get on the wrong side of the court by not filing something they had asked for. Most likely though is things just overlapped in the postal mail since he'd forgotten to request paperwork be dealt with via email.
Regardless, everything ended well before anything beyond trivial court paperwork happened. Nothing to see here, move along, move along.
So another update from Sterling's lawsuit.
REPLY to Response to Motion re:33 MOTION to Amend/Correct1 Complaint filed by James Oliver Romine, Jr. (REK)
Ummmm...from what I can see, in only two sentences he wrote, he submitted this in response to his previous motion to correct another part in his complaint from the same section where "only US Code 28 ? 4101 was meant to struct through. USC 42 ? 1985 was still meant to be intact.". At the end of the document, he attached the same section of his complaint from his previous motion, but the USC 42 ? 1985 is not crossed out anymore.
I guess this is kind of proving Sterling's lawyers point even more that he's pretty much wasting the court's time and judicial resources by submitting yet another unnecessary reply since the motion to dismiss is still under review. I have a feeling that the judge will get pretty angry about this now.
REPLY to Response to Motion re:33 MOTION to Amend/Correct1 Complaint filed by James Oliver Romine, Jr. (REK)
Ummmm...from what I can see, in only two sentences he wrote, he submitted this in response to his previous motion to correct another part in his complaint from the same section where "only US Code 28 ? 4101 was meant to struct through. USC 42 ? 1985 was still meant to be intact.". At the end of the document, he attached the same section of his complaint from his previous motion, but the USC 42 ? 1985 is not crossed out anymore.
I guess this is kind of proving Sterling's lawyers point even more that he's pretty much wasting the court's time and judicial resources by submitting yet another unnecessary reply since the motion to dismiss is still under review. I have a feeling that the judge will get pretty angry about this now.
If he was represented by an actual attorney, there's a much higher chance his various motions and pieces of paperwork would have been filed properly in the first place.Mangod said:
...But on the other hand, one gets the impression that even many "ambulance chasers" would have looked at this case and said, "I'm not getting my name attached to this mess."
I think Romine is fortunate that Sterling isn't of a similar mind to his opponent; if he was, Romine would probably be facing a counter-suit on racketeering charges.
Is there any way to tell when the case enters its "winding down" phase or is that just wishful thinking on my part?
Well, they're basically out of business. How much farther can ya go on a hope without a prayer?Cold Shiny said:
Stop me if this has already been discussed to death, but does anyone else think that the extra 88-ish of 100 users DH were trying to sue were just placeholders that they were planning to fill in as the case went by? I mean, my Steam username was mentioned in one of the screenshots of 'harassment' evidence (I'm not one of the usernames they're explicitly trying to sue, mind: the screenshot was of me talking with one of the people who ARE named), so I can't help but think that they were essentially trying to hold the axe over everyone's heads and say "hey, watch what you say about us if you don't wanna be on the list".
That pretty much seems to be the truth. There's honestly no reason to sue 100 different anonymous Steam users for widely different intensities/amounts of 'harassment.'Infernal Lawyer said:
It's the exact same as the suing/threatening lawsuits against youtube critics. They are attempts to silence people with the mere threat of litigation.
edit: A similar (but more extreme) example of the same behavior is when the music industry sued a man for more money than exists in the entire world due to audio file sharing.
Speaking of threatening Youtubers, has anyone here actually SEEN those comments? I'm not saying they don't exist (they don't ANYMORE, to tell the truth, since the Romines did their typical "shit that was a stupid thing to say let's wipe all the evidence"), but a good amount of them pretty much mentioned that they could contact the Romines IMMEDIATELY AFTER saying that they were part of the suit.Avnger said:
I mean, as you said in your edit it's not exactly new to scare people with overblown numbers and then offer to settle out of court, but saying "By the way, pay me money and shut up, and I'll leave you alone" IMMEDIATELY after telling someone the suit is on the way makes your master plan a little TOO obvious, doesn't it?
The original court documents are uploaded to PacerMonitor usually within 24 hours. https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/19146067/Romine_v_Unknown_Party_et_al - but accessing it is a paid service.Infernal Lawyer said:
There are other sites (plainsite.org and the unitedstatescourts.org), but their service is that anyone can view the documents as long as at least 1 person has paid to go get them.
However at least one of the intended steam members had access to the court feed and copied those documents to Google Drive. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B6FG7o2HBZWlbHRCcXJpSDNibm8
Documents 1, 2 and 3 include the screenshots/scanned documents that James Romine was using as evidence.
If you want to go look at them, that's probably the easiest place to view them.
Beware though, the images look like scanned copies of poor printed images. It's not easy reading.
And as much as it's unpopular to say so, in the hands of a competent lawyer and based on what I've read about legal requirements for Libel and Slander in the majority of US states, someone in the future might have a reasonably chance of proving deformation against similar written comments. Some of these statements ARE provably wrong and are published in a place where there is a mass audience. Plus the legal defence of "fair use" is even more tentative there. Deformation isn't about being deliberately malicious where the consequences matter, inadvertent harm counts too.
I was talking about the threats Digital Homicide made, not any statements made ABOUT them, slanderous or otherwise.Elwes said:
Even assuming that DH has a case, they seemed to be pretty eager for a quick payout from the people they were threatening. Telling someone they can pay you to go away immediately after telling them the suit is on it's way makes it look like you're bluffing.
I know I shouldn't be putting politics here (not been disrespectful or violating any rules) but if Obama signs this law, DigiHom's hopes to continue sue Jim or attempt to sue once again the 100 may his a snag - ladies and Gents, meet the Consumer Review Fairness Act http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/11/congress-passes-law-protecting-right-to-post-negative-online-reviews/